It is perhaps a radical view of the Sphinx and its mystery, but if the impenetrable reality is a human being, two Hollywood legends that qualify as our unanswered questions are Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich.
Beginning with Ms. Monroe, there really are no classic, “dumb blondes” in Europe.
“Dumb blonde” is an exclusively American label.
However, no “dumb blonde” has ever or will ever receive so much attention from world renowned intellectuals, male and female, as Marilyn Monroe.
Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Lee and Paula Strasberg and, of course, the Kennedy’s.
I’m not sure just how erotic were the powers of the ancient Sphinx but I doubt such magic could equal the sometimes inspiring fantasies provoked in headier corners of American culture by Marilyn Monroe.
The rest of us, that rude multitude which keeps returning to her movies in order to cast our eyes upon her seemingly utter lack of self-consciousness, we always … until the end, that is … smiled when we saw most of her performances.
It was the end that somehow left her a mystery.
Rather like James Dean, her sudden death not only gave us no time to say goodbye, we were left with a mystery which in both cases, Dean and Monroe, remains.
Some Like It Hot was on television last night in a multi-film tribute to its director/producer, Billy Wilder.
I must say, Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis set a level of achievement in romantic comedy that has rarely been surpassed.
No, I don’t even think Tracy and Hepburn were ever quite as painfully delicious as Curtis and Monroe in Some Like It Hot.
While Jack Lemmon and Joe E. Brown romped through broad burlesque, Curtis and Monroe held a level of high comedy that climaxed, if you’ll forgive the expression, in their scene together on the yacht.
This was a divine pairing which I don’t believe either of them ever achieved again in any other film.
They both could have given lessons to George Burns and Gracie Allen.
Why Hollywood never paired them up again is one of that insanity’s major oversights.
Yet the mystery of Monroe’s Sphinx-like escape from life?
To this day, no one knows whether her death was accidental, a suicide or a murder.
This, of course, leaves all possible clichés of explanation out of our reach.
We can’t ever be sure.
That her life stretched into the highest halls of American power, right into the White House, conjures up a revelation of American identity that has us all simultaneously embarrassed and titillated.
Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates, is, I believe, the deepest peek into the mystery of Marilyn Monroe.
Ms. Oates leaves her subject an unending but powerful stream of questions.
“If only” is a common response to the unfolding narrative.
If only she hadn’t, at least according to Ms. Oates, aborted the child she had conceived while sharing her home with two men.
Her career called and the standards of Hollywood demanded she not be pregnant out of wedlock.
That is hardly the case now, is it?
Oh, well, Europe had Marlene Dietrich and we had Marilyn Monroe.
I have no doubt there were moments for both Dietrich and Monroe when they both yearned to trade places.
Without a doubt, however, our little human race has been, is and will be enormously enriched for the performances they both left us with.
They were and still are the exceptional miracles of Hollywood.
Utterly different and yet equally as mesmerizing,
They had both been directed by Billy Wilder and, of course, were exploited by him shamelessly for their screen identities.
In Foreign Affairs Dietrich plays a rather nasty, manipulative, German femme fatale in her middle years … 46 to be exact … whose undeniable ethic is “anything it takes to survive.”
Sixteen years earlier, she had burst upon the world, however, playing a similar but much younger, European bombshell in The Blue Angel.
Falling In Love Again became her signature song, her larger-than-life character’s credo.
It was as if life itself were an endless set of possible love affairs.
Yet people who knew her say she was immensely down-to-earth, practical, filled with common sense, even a bit of a hausfrau.
Juggling both ends of female possibility, she survived, indeed, into her 91st year!
Dietrich, an utter triumph in her life and the other, Ms. Monroe, a tragedy.
Yet both, for me at any rate, are Sphinx-like.
That is their power and, perhaps, a common-denominator to most screen stardom.
Though I find little mystery in, say, the magnetism of either James Cagney or Kirk Douglas – the massive screen energy of both being their main attraction – I find the most indelible personalities within great film acting have that x factor, that indecipherable mystery within their work.
Perhaps if we gazed into ourselves with the same kind of respect for our own mystery that we have had for Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe we might very well understand what it is to be a miracle.
Albeit an ordinary miracle.
But a miracle nonetheless.
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